Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press entitled American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It. From 2001 to 2007, Granick was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. From 2007 to 2010 she served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

Much consideration has been given to the role of tools in recruitment to extremist violence, the desirability of restricting the use of tools for those purposes, the collateral effects of such restrictions, and the opportunity to use tools for alternative narratives.

This blog concludes that in some cases, restrictions on such uses can be desirable. At the same time though, with few exceptions, the choice of such restrictions should be left to the private sector, and carried out in a way that advances liberal principles. Moreover, there is unlikely to be a solely technological solution to the problem of radicalization or its products, including planning of terrorist attacks. Ultimately, it may be people rather than tools, that are the most effective resource for curtailing extremist violence.

Right now, all eyes are on Riverside, California, where a federal magistrate judge issued an unprecedented and dangerous order to Apple on February 16 compelling the company to create and cryptographically sign a special, crippled version of its iOS software that disables certain iPhone security features.

The FBI investigates a grizzly murder. You are a bank president. The murderer stored his phone book in your bank's safety deposit box, the code for which is encrypted with copyrighted proprietary software, before he committed the murder. The FBI demands that you provide it with the master code for the box, which can be used to unlock other boxes, too. You can give the FBI the code, but should you? Apple CEO Tim Cook is asking himself the same question, his answer is rightly "no."

On Friday, the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity published its final report, making 16 recommendations and identifying 53 action items to improve cybersecurity in the United States.

Palo Alto lawmakers have proposed legislation granting the community greater control over police surveillance — including the Police Department’s purchase and use of equipment such as drones, license plate readers and social media monitoring software. Palo Alto and 10 other cities around the country that have proposed similar laws are part of a movement to bring the community and elected representatives into decisions by local police to acquire such powerful and invasive surveillance technologies. We all should urge our own elected representatives to take similar steps.

As users of Twitter and many other services probably know, large parts of the Internet weren’t working Friday, thanks to a hacking attack on the Internet’s infrastructure. NBC reported that a senior intelligence official told the network that the hack “does not appear at this point to be any kind of state-sponsored or directed attack.” It may be that new evidence emerges that leads the U.S.

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Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"“This is another example of how the government is pushing secretly novel or innovative interpretations of surveillance law” to conduct wiretapping in broader ways than the public realizes, said Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society."

""I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,"' said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

"“The Justice Department is pushing the envelope,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Big companies like Apple and Microsoft have the wherewithal to push back, she said. But smaller companies may cave, rather than risk an expensive fight."

"Two lawyers and legal researchers based at Stanford University have formally asked a federal court in San Francisco to unseal numerous records of surveillance-related cases, as a way to better understand how authorities seek such powers from judges. This courthouse is responsible for the entire Northern District of California, which includes the region where tech companies such as Twitter, Apple, and Google, are based.

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Join Mozilla and Stanford CIS for the second installment in a series of conversations about government hacking. Information from our first event, discussing the upcoming changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, are available at that event’s page here.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Stanford Cryptography Policy Project, we are holding an afternoon event highlighting our research and accomplishments over the past year. As our keynote speakers, it is our pleasure to welcome the Honorable Stephen W. Smith, Magistrate Judge of the Southern District of Texas, and Paul S. Grewal, former Magistrate Judge of the Northern District of California.

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"FBI Director James Comey has said that voter-registration sites in at least a dozen states — including Arizona — were targeted by hackers.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has broached the idea of increasing the protection for the nation’s voting systems. They could potentially be put under the umbrella of critical infrastructure, which currently includes the electrical grid and the banking system, among other things.

Jennifer Granick talks about how notions of privacy have changed over the years and where she thinks things are headed in the future. She is a professor at the Stanford School of Law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society, where she specializes in the intersection of engineering, privacy and the law.